Discussions

Well looking at that chart it could be hard to find PC colors for a PC site so I guess I shouldn't have brought the original reference up at all. (whoops I don't think this editor has the ability to remove this quote from this post -Doh!)

The main point I wanted to make that as a solid fill color in rectangular shape/background it IMHO doesn't fare too well against many other colors.

Actually, I think the teal theme is a big improvement over orange and yellow. It's not like you can see much of the teal anyway. The only place it shows up is in the stripe across the top.

I really don't see what is so "enormously ambitious" about this. If you take the WP7 SL+XNA version and adapt it to run as a full-screen framework on Win7, why would implementing things like IsolatedStorage be so difficult? It could be essentially a sandbox
where the only API the apps will have is what's in the WP7 version of SL+XNA. You can't P/Invoke in WP7, so why should this change when it is run on Win7? The storage related classes will work just like the ones on WP7.

Anyway, I think people somewhat misunderstood my initial idea. I wasn't thinking about tablets that are as "lightweight" as the iPad, I was thinking about tablets that can already run Win7 as is. This is a way to make it more attractive for consumers by
providing some of the simplicity of what people like about the iPad. Since W3bbo asked specifically what advantages SL+XNA had in this case, this is what I'm thinking:

With the recent interest in WP7 development (read this blog for instance), making it easy to bring those same apps to existing Win7 tablets (and newer
tablets) would give them a user experience that seem to be popular outside of geek-minded consumers.

Have you seen the WP7 development tools...!? Compare to other development environments.

Compare how apps are installed/uninstalled in iPad/iPhone/WP7 to how it is done on Win7. People really don't want to go to Add/Remove programs and search through a long list of confusing products to uninstall something. They want to press and hold its icon
and choose to uninstall it.

I always feel that I don't want to give up the ability to run some of my favorite older desktop apps or games on a tablet. You need just
one such an app or game to make something like the iPad a no-go. So having the ability to still do that is important I think.

EDIT: Access to the Windows Marketplace, in a similar way as you will be able to do with WP7. Finding/seeing reviews and ratings/buying/installing/uninstalling tradional Windows applications is a PITA.

"I wasn't thinking about tablets that are as "lightweight" as the iPad, I was thinking about tablets that can already run Win7 as is. This is a way to make it more attractive for consumers by providing some of the simplicity of what people like about the
iPad."

That may be the catch though. The users who want the simplified interface tend to want the 'lightweight" hardware and feature set of the iPad. The users who want the 'heavyweight' hardware capable of running the full OS don't have a lot of use to sometimes
switch down to a simplified UI. The biggest problem is in companies trying to find a single solution for these very different market segments.

The more consistency between the APIs of these different devices the better. If the UIs can be made to swap out, so much the better I guess, but I don't see many people doing it in the real world.

It would be a lot more effective if they gave 93,000 devices out to developers (outside of MS) than to give them to all employees. For WP7 to be successful, developers have to write apps for it. The best way to get them to write the apps is to give them
the hardware.

Then again, forced dogfooding throughout the company is probably the best/fastest way to get shortcomings with the system found and resolved.

It's even worse in Firefox. Any link, new page, new thread, etc. gives me a "continue" dialog box followed by either three or four of the Authentication Required dialogs to cancel through. It says I'm logged in, but I cannot post responses. The whole
C9 site has been effectively useless for the past couple days. IE8 seems to be working for the most part, but I get the authorization dialog occasionally.

Speak for yourself. I write exclusively in native code, because it is what I need to meet the requirements of the applications I write. It may be far from the mainstream these days, but there are plenty of other native developers out there in the same
boat, and all of us care about advances in native APIs. Writing native code is painful enough and lags far behind in getting support for newer features. Native apps tend to be more about the computation than the visuals, but anything to improve the graphical
options in native code is very welcome in my book.

Scott gets up and talks, he has good public presence and seems to always come accross as a good guy who's listening and wants to get it right.

ray and balmer - meh, who needs em?

The Gu would be a great public face, but to some degree he already is. Wouldn't want to dilute him from his current efforts any more. I could see Sinofsky in that role too. Ballmer has always been a disaster for the company and needs to get booted. He's
old-school Microsoft thinking that just isn't compatible with where the company needs to go. Who knows what Ozzie is up to since he never shows himself. In what little I have seen from him, I've never seen anything that made me think he has any clue, so
i'd send him packing with Ballmer.